Last week we looked at eight social trends that are behind the world’s coming ‘demographic winter’- the crisis of depopulation that will result in vastly more golden-agers than young people, and will plunge the world into a depression worse than the ‘Dirty Thirties’. But there are already social consequences from those trends.
We noted that easy divorce meant less family stability, and fewer children per family. But easy divorce has had other consequences:
- The children of divorce-or unmarried cohabiting parents, or intentional single parents-are statistically far more likely to be involved in trouble with the law, with drug addiction and alcoholism, with school failure and drop-out, with premature sexual activity, with teen pregnancy, with abortion, with suicide, and with other social aberrations.
- ‘Divorce waste’: because so many households in North America have so few people, there are more households per person than in the 1950s. The resulting effect on consumption is 75 billion kilowatt/hours more use of electricity than the same number of people would use in five-person-per-family households, and almost six trillion gallons more water used.
- Less happiness: a study of people who reported they were unhappy in their marriage found that 2/3 of those who “stuck it out” instead of divorcing, resurveyed five years later, reported their “happiness quotient” at 6 or 7 on a scale from 1 to 7. Commitment has many rewards.
- Data-based sociological studies confirm, over and over, that marriage is the best and safest place for men, women and children.
So why are fewer people marrying, and marrying later in life, and having fewer children? The answer is stunningly simple: the people who are married and raising families are busy with their families; the hedonists have more time and money, and better access to the media that influence social trends.